Country Life’s best architecture stories of 2018: Destruction, salvation and the Gunpowder Plot

Our roster of architecture writers have told some astonishing stories of country houses which have survived and now thrive despite everything history has thrown at them – and in one case from the selection below, a house which didn't quite make it. Here are the ten most popular of those articles from 2018.

A serious fire can be the end of a country house, but, on occasion, it can also offer the opportunity for a sensitive and thoughtful reworking of a building. Ince Castle demonstrates this to perfection.

It takes a practised eye to spot what has happened to Stockton House over the past four years. At first sight, the house, set in Wiltshire’s lovely Wylye Valley, looks much as it did when Country Life last visited in 1984 or even when we first wrote about it in 1905.
Read more at https://www.countrylife.co.uk/architecture/stockton-house-wiltshire-subtly-improving-on-the-elizabethans-172661#pgmTW8WhcvYHBuzW.99

Woodhall Park was the creation of two notorious Indian nabobs, Sir Thomas Rumbold and Paul Benfield. Both men grew exceedingly and rapidly rich in the 1760s. Both returned to England to invest their new fortunes in a country estate.